


counterpoint

by Elsin



Category: Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: (or at least inaccurate to my own experiences), Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Recovery, The Lord of the Rings References, Therapy, au of a fanfic of a fanfic, fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic, no beta we die like men, so many lotr references, too many in fact, wildly inaccurate depictions of therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 18:30:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20119723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsin/pseuds/Elsin
Summary: The world turns not on the big things but on the small ones.A necklace, a diagnosis.A blink.Sometimes, no one blinks.





	counterpoint

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [blink](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20034265) by [kitsunerei88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88). 

Let us say—it doesn’t take much to change things, does it? A diagnosis here, a necklace there—

Archie still wears the sign of the Deathly Hallows to AIM, and still he does not understand at all what it means, to so much of the world—he is a child. How could he know?

John Kowalski, just as much a child, meets his eyes across a Portkey ring, and learns his name as _Archie_—but then his eyes flicker down, and he sees the symbol, and he does not seek him out. His curiosity is piqued when _Archie_ says his name is Harry Potter (not Harriett, for he’s not a girl—) but this boy wears Grindelwald’s sign. And John has all his life known others’ secrets. Keeping one more is less than nothing; and he isn’t intrigued enough to work past the symbol around his neck.

He talks to Potter—_Archie_ _Black_, he learns from his thoughts—weeks into school, about the necklace, and he then knows as if the other boy had shouted it that he did not _know_ about its meaning to so much of the world.

Telling him is, John knows, hard on Black. It’s hard for him, too. He never expected to have to explain this at eleven. But it’s as much a kindness as anything else—if he’s going to walk around with Grindelwald’s sign around his neck, he has to _know_ what he’s doing.

The necklace disappears inside his shirt, which is about as much as John expected given the other boy’s strong reaction to being asked to take it off. It’s too little, too late, for him to make friends who aren’t newbloods in their year (and really only Hermione Granger at that; any others he might have managed will be warned away by now) but it’ll improve things for him going forward. And John himself will be less uncomfortable, too.

He puts the matter of Archie Black/Harry Potter from his mind, and goes about his life, making friends with Francesca and going to movies and learning to heal.

In the fall, Potter approaches him to ask about Quidditch, and John is regretful to have to send him away—but he’s taken already. He hopes that the other boy will make it onto a team.

(He doesn’t.)

Sometime in the past year, the other boy developed rudimentary Occlumency shields; it doesn’t take a genius to see why, what with how his spoken name and internalized one don’t match.

The other boy is a presence in his classes but little more than that.

The next year, the Blue Devils have an open spot, and John goes to Potter and asks if he’d like to play on their team. The other boy looks away, regret and something John can’t quite parse flickering across his face.

He says no.

Sometimes a crossroad in time is a big, important happening—the Rigel Black Scandal shakes Britain to its core, and nothing will ever be the same. Sometimes _your_ crossroads—it’s in the little things, isn’t it? A diagnosed disease, where none was diagnosed before. A single gift to a child by his dying mother—

Occlumency shields, carefully kept for so long, though they were never very good, left in disarray out of apathy, for—

He is not Harry Potter; he is Arcturus Rigel Black. And now that his cousin’s secret is out he has nothing important left to hide.

John is on his way to Dueling, absentminded—normally he’d watch where he was going better, but he nearly slams into Potter outside the school building, and grabs his arm to steady him.

“Whoa!” he says. “Sorry about that—I was in a hurry and I wasn’t looking.”

“No worries,” says Potter, and his smile is distracted. “I wasn’t looking either.” He tries to step around John, and that should be the end of it, but—

Something’s wrong. He needs a better look at Potter’s eyes to know what it _is_, but something is definitely wrong. So he doesn’t let go.

“Are you all right, man? You don’t look all right,” he says, internally wincing a little at his clumsy words. He and Potter—they aren’t friends. Something like this should be Granger’s business, not his, but—

“What are you talking about?” Potter laughs, and it’s obvious he never learned about John’s gift because he meets John’s eyes when he says, “I’m fine. Better than ever.”

And then John’s heart nearly stops, because to him an unprotected mind is as clear as eyes; it’s as easy to read.

Potter’s Occlumency shields are usually good _enough_ that it would take more effort than John cares to put in to get a read on him. Today they aren’t, and John _cannot_ let him go. Not when he knows what the other boy plans to do with his day. But he doesn’t know what to say, to this other boy who is not his friend.

Maybe it’s not the best thing to say, what he utters next. He still has a hold on Potter’s arm, at least.

“Like hell you are,” says John, and Potter gives him a strange look, which—well. That’s fair enough, isn’t it. Most of the time people who aren’t friends don’t call each other out on their bullshit, at least not so openly. “You can tell me, Archie Black,” he says instead. “I know we’re not friends. But you can tell me what’s wrong, if you want. You know I can keep a secret, after all.”

Potter stares at him, and around them time seems to slow. “How long have you known?” asks Black, and it’s only fair that John call him that now, isn’t it.

“Since the day we met,” says John. Lying won’t help him now.

“Oh,” says Black, and he lowers his head. Then he begins to laugh, a harsh, hysterical sound. It isn’t a _nice_ laugh.

(Kowalski _knows_. Kowalski has _always known_. And here he thought he’d done so well—)

“How could you possibly have known?” Black asks once his hysterical laughter has subsided, and John looks him over, considering, before answering.

“I’m a Natural Legilimens,” he says. “I’m used to knowing—and keeping—people’s secrets.”

There’s another long, tense silence, before Black attempts to wrest his arm away. John holds him fast, and Black glares at him.

“Let me go,” he snaps. “I don’t need you, you know, nor your _interfering_ ways—”

And if that’s the truth then John will eat his broomstick.

“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself. “So you can go jump off a rooftop?”

He didn’t really mean to say that, but it’s out there now, hanging heavy between them, until Black snarls wordlessly at him before throwing a minor jinx at him and spinning on his heel to run towards the school.

Black isn’t a duelist. John is, and he’s used to taking such light jinxes without pause. He does the only thing he can think of, then: he stuns the retreating form of Archie Black, who drops like a stone and doesn’t get up. Quickly he cancels the jinx and goes to Black.

What to do now?

He ponders the question for a little while, but in the end he just levitates Black in front of him and brings him to the infirmary.

“Mr. Kowalski!” says Healer Strauss as he enters. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and gotten non-Dueling Club students mixed up in your _brawls_ now.”

John grimaces even as he lowers Black’s prone form carefully onto a bed. “Not… exactly,” he says. “But I didn’t know where else to take him, though I don’t know if it’s quite my place to tell you why.”

Healer Strauss knows of his gift. All the staff do. She frowns at him, though.

“What’s he in danger from, then?”

“Himself, mostly,” says John. “I don’t know the half of it, but—you probably shouldn’t let him at his wand for now. And you should ward wherever it is you put him. He’s likely to try to leave, and—well. If he won’t tell you why I stunned him and brought him here, I’ll tell you myself, but—”

He swallows, shakes his head.

“You shouldn’t let him leave till you know,” he says, “and when you do—well, that’ll be your decision. Your call to make.”

“Very well,” says Healer Strauss, and John leaves the infirmary, feeling both relieved and unsettled.

Relieved—

Black is safe in body, at least for now.

Unsettled, though, because—

It should not have gotten this far. John knows this, though he doesn’t know quite what should have been done: regardless of that, it should never have come to this.

Archie wakes in the infirmary, and finds he wants to rage, or cry, or do _something_. Somehow express his frustration that he’s _here_, still. He’s been an inconvenience far too long. He should be gone by now—but no.

Kowalski. John _fucking_ Kowalski, who’s known for years, who’s never said a word, initiated all of _two_ conversations with Archie—

“Excellent,” says Healer Strauss, taking a seat next to his bedside, and Archie wearily levers himself up. “You’re awake.” Here she pauses, and gives him a severe look. “Now, Mr.… Potter. Would you care to tell me how you ended up in your current state, and why it is that Mr. Kowalski brought you here, stunned?”

“My current state?” says Archie, too tired by far to care about the hesitation she placed before his (false) surname.

“Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately?” asks the healer, and Archie shakes his head even as a faint foreboding comes over him. She conjures him one, and he takes one look in it and slumps back.

It’s really all over. He knew that before, of course—but—

He’s himself again. Arcturus Rigel Black.

He finds that he doesn’t have the energy or will to shift himself back—and what good could it possibly do, anyway? The ruse is _done_. There’s no need anymore.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard the news from Britain,” he says, because at this point explaining is easier than not.

“If you are referring to the news of the child who was attending Hogwarts as Arcturus Rigel Black being revealed to in truth be the girl called Harriett Euphemia Potter—then yes, we have indeed heard it, Mr.… Potter.”

“Black,” he says wearily. “It’s Black. I’m the real Arcturus Rigel Black, and this is what I typically look like. I’m—” And here he pauses; does he want to give up all his cards? He finds he doesn’t know and, quite frankly, doesn’t care. So he goes on, and says, “I’m a metamorphmagus.”

Healer Strauss gives him a look he can’t read, and says, rather than anything related to why he’s in her infirmary, “The Headmistress informed me that when you woke I should tell you this: America does not have an extradition treaty with Great Britain, Mr. Black. And we do not have their same laws in regard to the crime which is in your country called _blood identity theft_.”

Archie stares at her, something strangely akin to _hope_ kindling in him, nudging at the ever-present nothing.

“So if I stay…” he says, softly, carefully, not daring to go on.

“If you choose to stay here,” says Healer Strauss, “which you may certainly do, at least for the near future, then British law enforcement cannot touch you.”

“Oh,” says Archie, leaning back. He’s not—

He isn’t as much of a liability as he thought he was, then.

Still—he’s still not—he isn’t important, still. Not really. Not the way Harry is, his cousin/sister who’s already set the world on fire.

Archie himself is, after all, still wholly disposable.

But perhaps it is not quite so vital that he remove himself as a _liability_, or at least not vital that he do so immediately.

“Now that we have covered your identity and appearance,” says Healer Strauss, “I’d appreciate an answer to my other question.”

“Other question?” asks Archie, though he thinks he remembers it. He’s stalling; this question, above all else, he does not want to answer.

“What led to Mr. Kowalski stunning you and bringing you here?” she says patiently, far more patiently than he deserves.

And here he pauses, and thinks.

He does not want to tell her the truth, for all that it would be simplest. If he tells her—

If he tells her, then surely he won’t have another chance.

(It does not feel quite so pressing now, but it is not a door he wishes to close himself from.)

And if he does not—what else can he say? He doesn’t know John Kowalski well, but he _does_ know that there is little which would prompt him to this point.

“I jinxed him,” he says instead. Better to incriminate himself than tell her the truth—and after all what he has said is no lie.

Healer Strauss calls John back that evening, when Black is asleep in the ward. She takes him into her office.

“I asked Mr. Black why you stunned him,” she says. “He claimed it was because he’d jinxed you, and said nothing more on the subject.”

“Do you think he’ll say more?” asks John. He doesn’t—

He isn’t a _snitch_. That’s one of the things he knows about having his gift: he can’t go around just spilling people’s secrets willy-nilly. But Black isn’t his friend, and in this case—

He and Black could probably have been friends, in another life. But they aren’t in this one.

Strangely, that makes this easier.

“I don’t think he wants to volunteer more, no,” says Healer Strauss, and John swallows.

“Then I suppose I should tell you,” he says. “He did jinx me, yes, but it was because of what I said to him before that happened, and I don’t _entirely_ blame him.” He does, given that it’s no noble duty Black was running off to do, but he also isn’t particularly surprised that he’d do a thing like that.

“He was planning to jump off the school roof,” says John before he can lose his nerve. “I couldn’t—”

He couldn’t let him go. Not like _that_. So he did the only thing he could think to do and stunned him instead.

“Ah,” says Healer Strauss. “I had my suspicions—but thank you for telling me, Mr. Kowalski.”

“You’re welcome,” he says stiffly, and then he leaves her office and slips out of the ward.

Archie stays in the ward overnight.

In the morning they let him leave, but he has a bracelet on his wrist he can’t take off and about a dozen different monitoring spells anchored to it.

Maybe that should be interesting to him. Somehow it isn’t. Somehow—

This is a _healing_ thing, even if it _is_ being used on him in a way he hates. It ought to interest him at least a little.

It doesn’t.

Everyone does a double take on seeing his new (real) face. He can’t find it in himself to care too much.

This is, perhaps, the worst of it: they’ve written Dad on him, and even through his apathy knowing _that_ makes him want to curl up in a corner and <strike>die</strike> never come out.

(He’s been assigned a mindhealer. Archie does not think that that will do too much—he is a Black, after all. The madness is in his blood.)

Hermione comes back, and Archie smiles wanly at her, and does not explain his new jewelry.

(She’s angry with him, a bit. He can’t fault her for that, though he thinks it should hurt more than it does—she knows the real Harry now, after all. She’s got no use for Archie, who’s only a poor knockoff.)

His mindhealer is a young woman with shoulder-length red hair and startling violet eyes. She smiles kindly at him, and introduces herself as Alanna Trebond.

“Arcturus Black,” he says, even though she already _knows_ his name. “I go by Archie, usually.” She can call him whatever she wants; he finds he doesn’t particularly care.

She tells him that he can call her Alanna, if he wants.

“What do we do here, anyway?” he asks. “I… talk? You listen?”

“If you want,” she says. “I can give you strategies, ways to think about things. I can listen to you. I can be many things—though I should tell you now that should you indicate you’re an immediate danger to yourself, I will have to inform Healer Strauss. I tell you that because this will work better if you trust me, and I’d certainly hate to _blindside_ you with a thing like that.”

Archie nods. It makes sense; he’d not tell her anyway, if he were to try again, but now he knows he cannot.

He doesn’t blame her for any prospective telling on him. That’s fair enough, though he wishes she wouldn’t do anything for him.

He doesn’t need it, after all. He doesn’t need _anything_.

“What should I say?” he says instead of any of that. “I mean I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you want to know—I don’t know where I could possibly start.” The ruse, perhaps; the game is up with that, after all, so he can hardly do any _more_ damage.

“Why not begin at the beginning, if you want?” asks Alanna, a small wry smile on her face. “If you do, you can continue till you get to the end—or however far you wish to go—then stop.” She pauses, looks him over, and adds, “You know, you needn’t talk about yourself. You can, as I said, talk about whatever you wish to.”

Archie swallows. Whatever he wants? Well. He can talk about Harry, at least.

“My cousin Harry,” he says slowly, “has always wanted to be a great Potions Mistress, and according to her the greatest _teaching_ master in the world is Severus Snape, who teaches at Hogwarts.

“But Harry couldn’t go to Hogwarts. She’s a halfblood. So we switched—I wanted to learn healing, and Hogwarts isn’t a healing school but AIM is—and she wanted to study under Snape.”

He lays out the whole sordid affair for Alanna, and when he’s through with it his voice is ragged and the hour is up. So he gets up to go.

“I’ll see you in three days’ time, then,” says Alanna, and he nods. That’s his next appointment, he knows, and with the damned bracelet on _everyone_ will know if he skips out on it.

Of course he made sure to explain that none of this is Harry’s fault; she’s done so much, sacrificed so much, for her dreams. His madness is not even his _own_ fault: it is the fault in his stars, he knows, though he does wish that he might have been strong enough to resist it just a little longer.

Arcturus Rigel Black: mad, bad, and dangerous to know (for his only friends in all the world both became wrapped up in the thrice-bedamned Blood Tournament; what does _that_ say about him?) he thinks morosely.

Still, when he leaves the room, he feels oddly… lighter, perhaps. He isn’t _happy_. He hasn’t been happy for a very long time; not properly, at least. But he feels just a touch lighter.

Alanna watches her newest patient go, and resists the urge to rub her forehead until she’s absolutely certain he’s left the room and can no longer see her. She has an odd sort of gift, when it comes to healing; her magic is Dark and yet shapes well to the spells.

Healer Strauss briefed her on what they know before this meeting, and Alanna hopes she can help Archie—but she admittedly has less experience helping those who don’t want to be helped, and she herself has only been out of school a short little time.

She doesn’t know if she’s ever felt quite so young and uncertain as she does now.

It’s strange, isn’t it? The wheels of the world turn on a dime, its levers pivot over the head of a pin, and the littlest things can make the biggest difference.

A necklace, a diagnosis, a brief moment of eye contact.

An Exceptional healer only four years graduated.

They add up to something—

—though _what_, we cannot yet say.

When Sirius Black travels to America for the first time, he does so alone. James and Lily are tied up in England; they can’t go away, not when their elder daughter is the center of the Rigel Black Scandal. Remus—well, he’s a werewolf after all, and that makes everything international ten times harder. So Sirius goes alone. There’s no one else whose company he’d want.

He meets Archie in a small private sitting room provided by the Headmistress. Archie grins to him and gets to his feet, then, after a moment’s hesitation, gives him a hug—

He steps back. This isn’t—

He’s been abusing Dad’s trust for years. Archie knows he doesn’t deserve a damn thing from him, not now, not anymore; least of all his warm embrace.

“I’m sorry,” he says stiffly, because—

He doesn’t think he’s sorry for the whole thing. But he _is_ sorry that Dad has had to find out about it in such a way.

(One would think that Archie could do the decent thing and not inconvenience anyone anymore. But of course John _fucking_ Kowalski thought different, and here he is, stuck.)

The door to the rooftop no longer opens for him, no matter how much dark magic he sinks into its lock. It’s not as if—

He only wants to <strike>jump off and let himself fall</strike> look around, after all.

What could be so wrong about that?

John sits near enough to Black in some of their classes that he can see the silver bracelet glinting on the other boy’s wrist when he’s not paying attention and lets his sleeve slip back. He tries to approach Black a time or three, but it’s clear from his reactions that Black isn’t at all interested in talking to him.

Instead he approaches Granger, and what he says to her is as vague as he can make it while still being helpful.

“Granger,” he says, coming up to her one day when Black’s nowhere to be found. “I—it’s not quite my place to say. But you ought to know—your friend, Black. He’s not been in a great place this year.”

Granger eyes him suspiciously, and says, “How do you know?”

“I have eyes,” he says mildly, “and that’s—that’s not really the matter at hand. I don’t think.” He sighs. “Look, I know that you’re not exactly happy with Black right now. Just—try not to be too hard on him, all right?”

“All right,” says Granger, though she still looks terribly suspicious of him, and he goes on his way.

Neal Queenscove is seventeen, and a dorm monitor; as such, he has a list of younger students who need more of an eye on them. Mostly this list is for medications.

Sometimes it is not.

Sometimes, it is a watchlist, keyed to a monitoring spell—

The name _Arcturus Black/Harry Potter_ appears on his sheet, and he frowns down at it.

He would not have thought Potter—Black—to be the sort, yet—

It’s so often just that way, is it not?

He runs into Alanna one day when he goes into town, and finds her browsing through a bookshop, tapping a finger absentmindedly against her lips.

“Looking for anything?” he asks her; for all that she’s four years older, they were friends of a sort back in Dueling Club.

“A book or three for a fourteen-year-old boy,” she says. “Thing is I’m not sure what he’d like, and—I can’t say who he is, of course.”

Of course she can’t. Patient confidentiality and all that. But Neal can make an educated guess, and the signs all point to the same thing.

“Do you think he’d read _The Lord of the Rings_?” he asks. “I mean, if that’s the sort of theme or character arc you’re after—Frodo’s hardly a bad example.”

Alanna looks up at him sharply, violet eyes narrowed, then sighs.

“Dorm monitor,” she mutters. “It figures.” She skims along the shelves till she can pull _The Fellowship of the Ring_ off of one, and turns it over consideringly. “Not bad,” she says. “The prose is a bit dense, in places, but—he’ll manage, I think.”

She takes all three volumes to the front and pays for them.

Archie has been excused from homework ever since his overnight stay in the infirmary. He’s still meant to show up to class and do in-class work, but he’s been excused from having to complete the homework.

The fact that this means he’ll get even further behind ought to bother him; it doesn’t.

He can’t be a healer, after all, not with his _Dark_ magic in his veins, even if there _is_ a bit more of it than he’s used to, what with it not being tied up in his transformation anymore.

He goes to his second session with Alanna Trebond as bone-weary and apathetic as he was the first time.

“Do you ever read for pleasure?” Alanna asks him when he sits down, after he’s let enough time pass silently that she can be fairly certain he’s not going to start talking.

“No,” says Archie, startled. “I mean—as a kid—”

As a child his mother read him stories, and then he read stories to her, and the sign of the Deathly Hallows still hangs around his neck under his shirt.

“Not anymore,” he says.

Alanna gives him three books, tells him that she thinks he’d like them, and if he wants to read them and does do it she’d be happy to discuss them with him in some of their sessions. He stares incredulously at her.

“If you don’t want to read them, or can’t make it through, that’s fine too,” she says. “Though if the latter’s the case, please do tell me.”

“All right,” he says uncertainly.

He sits in the corner of the common room, and opens _The Fellowship of the Ring_ later that night. He hasn’t read a single story for its own sake, he doesn’t think, since—

Since Mum died.

But Alanna gave this to him, and he still hates disappointing people (though lately he’s been nothing _but_ a disappointment), so he decides he’ll try it.

Hobbits are an interesting people, he decides, though they also seem a bit too cheerful to be real.

But when he finally reads through the prologue, which is not any worse than any of the journals he’s read from the Black family library—he’s not certain why Alanna thought he would struggle—he reaches the true story and he revises that opinion swiftly.

_When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton…_

Hermione shakes his shoulder lightly, and he blinks, and looks up at her. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have just met Strider at the Prancing Pony, and he hates to leave them there. But when he looks around he sees that the common room is empty and dim, and when he looks at the clock he realizes that hours have passed while he traveled to Hobbiton.

Archie nearly wants to cry at that realization; he has not been able to read anything, he realizes, for a year or more. Not really, at least. His every reading has been fraught with distraction. And yet—

He hasn’t read anything except to learn since Mum died.

Maybe that’s why, then.

Over the weekend he works his way through _Fellowship_ and he’s halfway through _The Two Towers_ by the time his Monday appointment comes around.

They talk about the story and the characters the whole time, and Archie is too distracted to notice that this is the most animated he has been in a very long time.

He isn’t _cured_, or _fixed_, or even really recovering yet, of course. That will come later. It cannot come swiftly; it never does.

But for now, perhaps for now—

—perhaps this is enough.

He stumbles through “The Houses of Healing,” for his heart beats too loud in his chest and tears blur his eyes when Éowyn speaks on how she did not want to return from the battle; how she is upset, not glad, that she lived.

He cannot finish “The Steward and the King.”

Éowyn decides that she will be a shieldmaiden no longer and instead will become a healer and love all that which grows, and Archie cries for an hour into his pillow, till his eyes burn and his throat and head ache, and doesn’t think about how this is the first time he’s _felt_ the loss of his dream.

Is it lost?

He thinks it is.

Perhaps you do not yet think it is so.

(Perhaps we still must see.)

He falls asleep, misses his Friday classes, and when he goes to his appointment he says, “I am not Éowyn, Alanna,” with a frown on his face.

“I never said you were,” says Alanna.

He finishes the chapter in fits and starts over Saturday, and by the time Tuesday rolls around he’s steadily working his way through the appendices.

“There isn’t a West here,” he says, and Alanna tilts her head at him consideringly.

“Isn’t there?” she says. “Isn’t there, from a certain point of view?” She pauses. “Not that I think one should try to reach it,” she adds. “After all there are no elves to invite a person there.”

“I suppose there aren’t,” says Archie. “I used to like to sit on the roof, you know,” he tells her. “I can’t—I can’t get up there anymore. This thing doesn’t let me through.” He gestures at his bracelet as he says it.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” says Alanna. “Is there anywhere else you could sit?”

Somewhere less dangerous, she must mean. That’s not surprising.

“Maybe,” he says.

There’s a small wood on the AIM school grounds, hardly more than a copse of trees; Archie takes to lingering there, sometimes. In its heart is a small clearing with a mossy boulder; under the golden-green light, he finishes reading the appendices.

Alanna gives him _The Hobbit_ and _The Silmarillion_ next, and he reads through them under the trees, and for a moment thinks himself perhaps a Man of Númenor; he who grew proud, and fell—

(but he did not fall)

—but that is not right; it cannot be. For though he is terribly selfish, in an awful way, he does not think he is too proud.

He, like them, cannot sail into the West.

“How do you turn back the clock?” he asks Alanna once. “How do you make things return to how they were before?” If he could, he’d return to then; to that easier time.

Alanna looks at him, softly, gently, and says, “You can’t go back. You can only move forward.” She’s right, of course. The Shire will never be the same. Even Harry, with her time-turner in their third year, couldn’t go back in the way _he_ wants to.

“Sometimes you change,” he says to her. “Sometimes… sometimes the world changes.” Sometimes both, he doesn’t say.

Perhaps he is not as Éowyn, as he told Alanna weeks ago.

(He would cast himself as Frodo, perhaps, if it did not seem so terribly arrogant.)

(Archie cannot be arrogant.)

He hasn’t heard from Harry at all since her revelation, and all Dad told him was that she was in the wind.

She isn’t answering her mirror, which worries him more than everything else combined.

He hopes she’s all right.

Hermione is trying to seek him out. Archie is as certain as anything that he doesn’t wish to speak to her, and, accordingly, avoids her—he assures himself that she’s better off without _him_, poor substitute for Harry that he is, but that doesn’t quite stop the guilt twisting in him.

Kowalski almost seems to be seeking after him as well, but Archie feels no guilt at avoiding _him._

One day he goes into town. It’s the first time he’s been there; perhaps that is not as it should be, but it is what it is.

He cannot change the past.

Archie isn’t really _meant_ to be going into town, he’s certain, and so it doesn’t surprise him much when Alanna, dressed in Muggle clothes and looking much younger than she usually does, slides into the seat across from him in the diner.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says dryly.

“Imagine that,” she replies, just as dry.

There’s a pause, and Archie receives the “milkshake” he’s ordered. Other people were ordering them too, and he didn’t want to stand out, though he hasn’t the faintest idea what it _is_. Alanna grins and orders one of her own.

“Try it,” she says encouragingly. “I think you’ll like it.”

He does, he finds; he ordered one that was lavender and blueberry, and the flavors mix in ways he’d never have imagined, all delightful—if delight were something he could feel anymore, at least.

Alanna’s arrives, lemon, before either of them speaks again.

“You can’t—you can’t do infectious diseases properly,” says Archie to the table, “when you’ve got a core the size of mine and some of it always tied up holding a form. And now—” Now, he realizes, he doesn’t even know. He’s hardly tried anything since—

“Anyway,” he says, going on, “I wanted—I wanted—” He sighs, and shakes his head. “‘_Look not to me for healing!_’” he quotes. (Perhaps he has read these chapters a time or ten too many.)_ “‘I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle._’” Archie takes a drink from his milkshake, and says bitterly, “I’m afraid I might be a bit more Éowyn than I thought, Alanna. Only I can’t have her resolution, can I?”

“Why not?”

“She puts down her sword and shield,” he says wearily, “and becomes a healer, but—well. I can hardly do that, not properly, now can I?”

“What makes you think that? You had top grades all the way through your classes until this year, and even this year you’ve kept up well enough in the magic even if your grades have slipped somewhat.”

Archie looks up at her, scowling fiercely, and says, “All the high-level healing spells, all the spells I’ll need to work with, to be the kind of healer I want to be—they’re all Light spells. And me? I’m as Dark as they come.” He laughs bitterly, and looks away again. “And not powerful enough, besides,” he mutters.

“Archie,” says Alanna, and there’s a careful intensity in her voice that Archie hasn’t heard before. “Looking at me—what do you think _my_ affinity is?”

“Light, I’d expect,” says Archie morosely. “What with you being a mindhealer and healer and all that.”

“No,” says Alanna, “not at all. In that respect I’m just like you—as strongly Dark as you can be.”

Archie’s gaze snaps to her, and his breath catches in his chest. “But all the high-level spells for healing—”

“_Most_ of them are Light, yes,” says Alanna. “Not all of them. Some are Neutral, and a fair few are Dark, and while you won’t ever be able to do everything a Light healer can do the exact way they can do it, they won’t match _you_ spell-for-spell either. And really, that would be the case no matter your affinity—there’s always something you can do that someone else can’t. Always something they can do that you can’t.”

“Oh,” says Archie softly, and lapses into thought.

Alanna pays their bill. He doesn’t understand American Muggle money well enough to not stumble all over it.

Of course this isn’t a _cure_. But do not be fooled by that—do not imagine that it does not _help_.

Archie starts trying in class and with homework again, just a little, though it’s nearly the hardest thing he’s ever done.

He cannot ask Hermione for help.

When she sits down next to him and announces that they absolutely _must_ study for their finals, he nods instead of avoiding her, and does not put a name to the relief that sweeps him.

“There’s madness in my family,” he says frankly to Alanna in their next session. “I suppose my fits nowadays are just that madness showing its face in _me_.”

“Hm,” she says. “Can you tell me about the other Blacks with this madness?”

“If you want,” says Archie, and he tells her about Bellatrix and Walburga and all the ancestors who showed the madness, back and back and back. The records are good, for his family. He tells her what they’re like; how they, to a one, have been cold and cruel and hard and how he cannot let himself become that. Alanna studies him as he speaks, and when he’s done she sighs.

“I have seen nothing in you to indicate anything like what you’ve described,” she says, and Archie swallows hard.

“You haven’t known me so very long,” he says, and Alanna shrugs.

“I haven’t, it’s true,” she says, “but I think I know you _well_ enough to say it.”

And again—this is not a cure, for there are no _cures_.

But Archie _remembers_.

In early June, when Archie is leaving his wood, his well-worn copy of _The Silmarillion_ tucked under one arm, he sees a girl across campus.

This would not ordinarily be a strange occurrence; AIM has many female students, and he does not know all of them. But this is a profile he thinks he recognizes, even from so great a distance, and so he hurries towards her.

He is correct. This girl is, he thinks, his cousin: Harriett Euphemia Potter.

(Normally, you would expect a boy to _know_ what his cousin/sister/twin looks like, but do not forget—he has not seen her true face since they were twelve years old. He is now almost fifteen. She is a little past sixteen. Some confusion is understandable.)

“Harry?” he says; he does not dare approach her further. He’d go to her, embrace her, but—

She is _Harry Potter_. And who is he?

(he is no one, not compared to her incandescent presence)

“Archie!” she says, whirling to him with a broad grin, and she launches herself at him to throw her arms around his neck. He’s taller than her now, he realizes distantly as he numbly hugs her back.

“How did you get to America?” he asks.

Harry steps back and shrugs, a little cagily he thinks. “I mean—you know who I’ve been spending summers with,” she says. “He’s got connections all over, you know.”

“Oh,” says Archie. Of course. It _would_ be the King of Thieves, after all.

Harry takes him to a theater, to see a _musical_.

A squib in Leo’s network introduced her to it in New York, she says. She likes it well enough; she thinks he’ll like it too.

He does, surprisingly; he likes it as much as milkshakes, though in a very different way. Not wanting to be interrupted this time, he managed to let someone know he’d be off campus, in town, and that his bracelet letting them _know_ that needn’t prompt them to send anyone after him.

Besides, Harry can heal, <strike>better than</strike> nearly as well as he can.

The musical is called _The Sound of Music_, and it tells the story of one family in Austria and their resisting of an invading authoritarian power through music.

It’s terribly idealistic.

He loves it anyway.

Leaving the theater they run into Kowalski and Lam, and when Kowalski waves at them (and Harry _sees_ him do so) Archie sighs and brings her over.

“Harry,” he says, “this is John Kowalski and Francesca Lam. Kowalski, Lam, this is my cousin, the real Harry Potter. ” And better than me, he does not say, though he meets Kowalski’s eyes just a bit too long—

He hasn’t used his Occlumency shields in months. Sue him if he didn’t think to do so _now_.

“It’s nice to meet you,” says Lam while Kowalski’s busy eyeing Archie, and Harry returns her pleasant smile.

“Likewise,” she says.

They start talking about school, then, and Archie wants nothing of that; he starts walking down the sidewalk and lets the others follow him.

“Are you looking for the diner with the best milkshakes in town?” Kowalski asks.

“Yes,” says Archie, though really he only _thinks_ so.

(He’s only been to the one, after all, but it was damn good.)

“Then you can turn down here for a shortcut,” says Kowalski, gesturing to a narrower alleyway, more dimly lit than the street they’re on. Archie shrugs and turns.

Of course they’re only halfway down the alley when something _happens_.

A figure in a hooded cloak appears before them with a crack, and another shows up behind them. Harry swears.

“Get behind me,” she says.

“Get back, all of you,” says Kowalski at the same time.

They glance briefly at each other before turning their backs—Harry facing the frontwards attacker, and Kowalski the rearwards one—with Archie and Lam between them. She asks what they’re doing there.

Apparently, there’s some sort of thing going on back in Britain, and Harry is (of course) wrapped up in it, and this is why these two have come to fight her and anyone she happens to be with.

Archie and Lam press against one of the walls; he’s mostly defenseless, and although he thinks she has something on her to help he doesn’t know for certain what it is and she doesn’t seem to have any attack capacity with it.

It also doesn’t block every curse. This is discovered the hard way: as Harry and Kowalski are finishing their fights, a curse lashes into her, and she cries out and falls, her chest and stomach cut deeply in a zig-zag that’s bleeding too, too much.

He doesn’t have anything _useful_ with him but his wand. No Blood Replenisher, so he works as quickly as he can—but the wound won’t heal, not with the curse on it.

Harry kneels beside him, already spelling a Blood Replenisher from her ever-present potions bag into Lam’s stomach. Kowalski’s there too.

“It’s cursed,” says Archie tightly, and Kowalski swears, mutters some spell Archie doesn’t know, then a moment later blinks.

“Is either of you Dark?” he snaps.

“I am,” says Archie, too startled to deny it.

“Then give me your hand,” Kowalski says. “Let me at your magic.”

Archie doesn’t question this, and obeys him.

The curse on Lam is aggressively, terribly Light; Archie’s Dark magic cuts through it like butter, and then Kowalski releases him and all three of them are hard at work healing Lam.

When she’s as healed as they can get her in the alley, Archie frowns: what’s the quickest way to get someone to them?

He grimaces then, for he _knows_ the answer to that, and with a quick motion and a strength he didn’t know he possessed he snaps his bracelet.

Alanna Apparates in thirty seconds later, looking tired and disheveled, barefoot and still in her pajamas. She’s glaring at Archie as soon as she appears, but he points at Lam instead.

“She needs help, _now_,” he says, “and we’ve done all we can. Can you get her help?”

Alanna looks at Lam, goes white, and nods. “Get back to school,” she says shortly, “and take the bracelet with you. I’ll take Lam, and deal with… _these_.” That’s directed at the unconscious attackers.

There are some things you can’t go through without becoming at least a bit closer than you were before, and saving another from certain death (or being saved by another) is one of them.

Harry leaves AIM after that; he asks her not to go, but she shakes her head.

“I have to,” she says, a bitter twist to her mouth. “I’ll keep putting you in danger, otherwise.”

And Archie wants only to laugh, because that’s _his_ line, dammit. He’s supposed to be the one with more guilt and what-have-you than he knows what to do with. Not Harry.

“I couldn’t have helped John break that curse in time,” says Harry softly. “My magic, it’s—well. It’s _odd_ is what it is. But, well, it isn’t Dark like yours. Not Dark enough to spike through a curse so Light, not as fast as yours did.”

He sighs, and gathers his nerves, and goes to talk to Hermione.

Kowalski and Lam join them at their studying after that, or—

Perhaps, now, he should call them John and Francesca.

Healer Strauss repairs his bracelet and chastises him for breaking it, but he doesn’t think she’s too angry with him, not really, given what he did it _for_.

He passes his exams. He writes Dad, and tells him that for the time he’ll be staying in America.

He can’t go back, not yet, not when he’s still a liability to his cousin though she may be half a world away, yet—

Perhaps here, in America, he can begin to make something out of his own sorry life.

Dad buys himself a plane ticket and rents them a flat in the town near AIM.

The world turns on the smallest things, does it not?

A necklace. A diagnosis. A novel, forty years old. A musical. A darkened alley. A bracelet.

They are so small, but they are so many, and the world—

—the world turns on them all.

**Author's Note:**

> Is this remotely realistic? Man I don't know. Is it a disjointed mess? I mean probably. But kit made me feel _feelings_ and this is how I dealt with them so uh yeet I guess.


End file.
